1. Technical Field
This invention generally relates to radio broadcasting and more specifically relates to radio receivers.
2. Background Art
For many decades, radio has been an important part of life in the United States, providing countless hours of news, entertainment, and music. Radio receivers typically receive radio signals from local radio stations that transmit their signal over an assigned frequency at or below a prescribed power level. Due to the power limitations imposed on radio transmissions, the range of a radio station is very limited. When a person gets into a vehicle to drive a long distance and tunes to a radio station, the reception on that radio station will typically degrade within an hour or two, forcing the driver to seek a new radio station. Manually scanning all the radio stations on the dial can be very annoying to a driver that wants to hear a particular type of radio program while driving. If the listener prefers country music, the listener must stop and listen to each station to determine if the station is playing country music. Likewise, if the listener prefers talk radio, the listener must listen to each station to determine whether the station is playing music or not, and if not, to determine whether the station is a talk radio station or is simply broadcasting a voice commercial or the voice of the disc jockey talking between songs.
Another aspect of known radio receivers is that there is currently no way to distinguish between different types of signals on the same radio station. In other words, once tuned to a radio station, the radio receiver simply transmits the audio output for that radio station to the listener. There is currently no known way to change the operational mode of a radio receiver based on the frequency spectrum of the signal being transmitted. Without a way for a user to mute unwanted radio programs or change stations to a different station that is playing the desired type of radio program, users will be forced to either listen to undesired programs, or to manually scan stations until a desired program is heard.